July 2020

As I have mentioned in the past, Jinja Honchō is generally extremely cautious about having any sort of online matsuri. However, the fact that COVID-19 has made it extremely unwise to hold many important matsuri in their normal forms, with large crowds of people, has led a number of important jinja to stream matsuri and other events online, so that people can maintain their connection to the jinja. In some cases, the priests introducing the live streams even ask people to pay reverence to the kami at the appropriate moments.… Read More »Online Matsuri

A while back, I wrote about an opinion piece in Jinja Shinpō that suggested that the jinja enshrining the war dead could move their focus to sport, since many of the kami enshrined there were sportsmen while they were alive. I also said that I thought this was a very positive idea. The other day, I read this year’s issue of Mahoroba, a glossy free magazine put out once a year by Jinja Honchō to publicise Shinto and Jinja. (Jingū puts out a similar magazine, called Musuhi.) The final article… Read More »Kami of Sport

From the beginning of this month, there has been serious flooding across a wide area in Japan. Kyushu, in the southwest, has been the hardest hit, but there has been serious flooding as far east and north as Nagano Prefecture, not too far from Tokyo. This was caused by the rainy season front, not a typhoon, and so the rain continued for about a week, from the 3rd to the 10th. Over the course of that week, some places had over 1 metre of rain, while in certain areas of… Read More »Floods

Twice a year, the highest body of Jinja Honchō, the Hyōgi’inkai, meets to approve the budget and rule changes that have been prepared by the directors. Normally, they also make a few proposals of their own. As the Hyōgi’inkai is over a hundred people, it normally functions as a rubber stamp, and that is even more true this year, when the meeting was held remotely and most of the members were not even consulted. One feature that was preserved was the presidential address. Tanaka Tsunëkiyo, the president of Jinja Honchō,… Read More »Presidential Address

As it looks like Japan is heading into the second wave of COVID-19 infections, Jinja Shinpō is continuing to report the activities of various jinja. There were two interesting articles, with a common thread (straw men!) in the latest issue. The first was about Kashima Jingū, an important jinja in Ibaraki Prefecture, a short distance to the northeast of Tokyo. The jinja displayed ten “Ōsukë” figures in its precincts in June. These are simple human figures made of straw, with fierce warrior faces drawn on rectangular pieces of paper and… Read More »Straw Men

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about a booklet of instructions for matsuri that Jinja Honchō had prepared for sōdai across the country. One of my readers asked a very reasonable question: given that matsuri vary a lot from place to place across Japan, is it actually possible to provide instructions that apply to everyone? The short answer to this question is “yes”, but things are a bit more complex than that suggests. While it is true that there are a lot of variations across Japan, there… Read More »Uniformity of Matsuri